Sean Hennessy, PharmD, PhD

Sean Hennessy, PharmD, PhD, uses healthcare data to generate real-world evidence about the health effects of prescription drugs. His team has studied serious health consequences of drug-drug interactions involving high-risk drugs including anticoagulants, antidiabetes agents and antiplatelet agents. His research has produced crucial knowledge about the cardiovascular safety of many widely-used drugs for mental health conditions including ADHD, depression and schizophrenia. He also evaluated an early approach to using medical insurance data to improve prescribing, finding it ineffective despite its federal mandate. This contributed to the omission of drug utilization review programs from Medicare Part D. He co-led a pair of studies demonstrating the effectiveness and safety of the SA14-14-2 vaccine for Japanese encephalitis (JE), which subsequently led to the immunization of millions of children per year in many populous countries including Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Use of that vaccine has been credited with reducing the incidence of JE. He co-developed the instrumented difference-in-differences design for study of the effects of rapidly increasing or declining exposures. He was also the senior author of a citizen petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that led to re-labeling of metformin, the best-proven oral drug for diabetes, to permit its use in the millions of persons with both diabetes and mild to moderate renal insufficiency.

Dr. Hennessy is a past scientific chair and past president of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, past chair of NIH’s Health Services Quality and Effectiveness study section, and has served on the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and the board of directors of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He is a co-editor of the books Pharmacoepidemiology, 6th edition and Textbook of Pharmacoepidemiology, Third edition.

Awards

• 2024 Kenneth Rothman Career Accomplishment Award, Society for Epidemiologic Research 
• 2024 William B. Abrams Award in Geriatric Clinical Pharmacology, American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 
• 2024 Ronald D. Mann Award for Best Paper Published in in 2023 Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety (with Neil Dhopeshwarkar, Wei Yang, Joanna M Rhodes, Adam Cuker, Charles Leonard) 
• 2015 Elected Member, National Academy of Medicine
• 2014 Julius W. Sturmer Memorial Lecture Award, Alpha Tau Chapter of the Rho Chi Society, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, University of the Sciences
• 2013 Samuel Martin Health Evaluation Sciences Research Award, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
• 2008 Leon I Goldberg Young Investigator Award, American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics
• 2005 Young Alumnus Award, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia
• 2002 Saul Winegrad Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Pennsylvania
• 1998 Stanley A. Edlavitch Award for Best Abstract Submitted by a Student, International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology

Courses Led:

• EPID 7050: Grantwriting and Scientific Writing